At the Imperial Palace Casino’s new sports book, each sport has its own betting sheet, and the sheets, stacked neatly in baskets for prospective bettors with corresponding labels: NFL, college football, MLB, golf, tennis, NASCAR.

One basket is different. It is labeled not by sport but by conference, the three letters recognizable to anyone ’round here, as they might say: S-E-C. “They don’t have these in Vegas,” says George Cole, the Imperial Palace’s sports book director. “SEC football—it’s where the action is here.”

… For now, the sports book will have to do. And that’s O.K. at the Hard Rock, where Schenk says they’ve seen a 15% uptick in foot traffic since opening their book. Next door at the Beau Rivage, the second set of college games is winding down, and it’s still packed, with nearly every seat occupied and a standing-room crowd encircling the venue, each craning their necks to see one of the eight games on the 24 televisions, many of them in college football apparel—a camouflage LSU hat, an Ole Miss wind-breaker, a Michigan T-shirt, a Texas visor. They were all here for a historic day: to, legally, bet on this region’s religion.

The top-ranked Crimson Tide enter the season as the consensus favorites for a third consecutive year. Alabama is +175 to win the national championship at the Westgate SuperBook in Las Vegas. According to Sportsoddshistory.com, those are the best odds for a preseason favorite since USC was listed at +160 before the the 2005 season.

Alabama has won two of the past three national championships and has been favored in 110 of its past 111 games.

Yeah, Clemson’s getting its share of early love.

No. 2 Clemson, at 4-1, is the clear-cut second favorite and has attracted significant interest from bettors in Las Vegas and New Jersey. More money has been bet on the Tigers to win the national title than has been wagered on any other team, including Alabama, at several sportsbooks.

At William Hill’s books in Nevada and New Jersey, 22 percent of the money bet on the national championship odds is on Clemson, substantially more than how much has been wagered on Alabama (14 percent) and three times more than has been bet on any other team.

But, ‘Bama.

More than half of the money bet on the national championship odds at DraftKings’ new sportsbook in New Jersey is on the Tigers and Tide, with 30 percent of it on Clemson, the company said.

Just think what one regular season upset would do for the talking heads at the WWL.

Right now, there is no standard in the NCAA for discussing player injuries.

“My university’s attorney told me, ‘You cannot be specific with any injuries. You can say upper body. You can say lower body,'” said Todd Berry, who coached college football for 34 years and is now executive director of the American Football Coaches Association. “Many times the media would already know what it was, but that’s all I could reference.”

Some coaches are more specific. Others are reluctant to share anything at all.

Washington State’s Mike Leach has a history of not even answering questions after a game about a player who was injured on the field. Chip Kelly also never talked about injuries while at Oregon — he’s now at UCLA — and eventually neither did his successor, Mark Helfrich, who’s now in the NFL. Miami’s Mark Richt used to be pretty open about injury updates but started to cut back because other coaches were withholding information.

Others are more forthcoming, like Joe Moorhead at Mississippi State and Duke’s David Cutcliffe.

That inconsistency could potentially raise red flags as legal gambling grows throughout the United States. If one coach reveals more than another, it opens up questions of whether it creates a chance for some gamblers to gain an unfair edge.

“When there’s less info out there, you have a greater chance of having inside information,” said Brad Powers, senior college football analyst for Pregame.com. “When there’s more information, when everyone knows everything — like the NFL, you know exactly if a guy is probable, doubtful or questionable — then nobody really has any inside information.”

Powers said bettors want a common language across the conferences. Coaches also want consistency, Berry said.

That could mean only releasing a player’s status for the game — an availability report, which may be the safest option. Or injuries could be defined as lower or upper body only.

“The more specific you get, the greater the chance is that you will wander into an area that is protected by one or both of those statutes (HIPAA and FERPA),” said attorney William H. Brooks, who works in the NCAA compliance and investigations group for his firm, Lightfoot, Franklin & White LLC.

To be honest, I don’t get all the fretting about this. As that quoted passage suggests, an availability report would seem to meet the concerns of both ends. Or am I missing something here?

Unlike some of you, I firmly believe that casino gambling in Georgia is a question of when, not if. There’s simply too much money to brush aside forever. Not just for state government, either — those integrity fees are gonna look mighty attractive to the folks at Butts-Mehre.

Quote Of The Day

“Just because they tweet something emotional during that time, that doesn’t matter,” Smart contended. “It gives the other team motivation. But our team was motivated to play Texas. Texas outplayed us, outcompeted us. They outcoached us. They out-physicaled us. They did a lot of things better than us.” — USA Today, 1/2/19